Savvis Unveils Project Spirit

Earlier this morning, datacenter and managed hosting provider Savvis (news, filings) [a subsidiary of CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings)] unveiled its next generation cloud computing platform, dubbed Project Spirit. The biggest feature? Virtual Private Data Centers, or VPDC's, with multi-tiered quality of service. The new platform will be powered by Nexus switches from Cisco and automated by vSphere and VMsafe by VMWare. Of course, at the moment this is just a project in development, it isn't even going into beta until wintertime.

Alongside the announcement, Savvis unveiled a cool demonstration video of how Project Spirit works - or at least how they expect it to work this winter. The GUI looks quite elegant and easy. Perhaps too easy actually for an engineer like me, who actually would want to know what is under the hood. But for someone who doesn't, the interface seems quite compelling. Because the cloud computing space is at such a young stage, it isn't yet clear to me what the balance should be between interface simplification and technical features. What do readers think, does Savvis's vision fit with your expectations of what cloud computing should bring?

And as an aside, just how many acronyms starting with VP do we need before we need to add another letter or something? Virtual Private Servers, Virtual Private Networks, Ethernet Virtual Private Lines, Virtual Private LAN Service, even Virtual Private Ring Service ... and now Virtual Private Data Centers? Is there anything that won't have a 'Virtual Private' doppelganger soon? Virtual Private CEOs would be kind of interesting...